They Know If You Feel Bad Or Good, So You'd Better Feel Good for Goodness Sake...

Increasingly we hear that it is not enough to do the right thing for the right reasons: you've got to feel the right way, too. Now we can look forward to a future in which that is enforced and transgressors punished.

Neuroscience's imaging technologies give us something we can actually see, which is different from psychology's creations. But there's a correlation/causation problem even in neuroscience, which is the mind/body problem necked down. Yes, this set of the brain is firing or not firing. How do you prove that, in a given case, the mind is experiencing sympathy (or not)? What if the person in question denies feeling sympathetic (or not)? Do you tell him he's wrong?

It won't bother those interested in control, for whom the fMRI is enough to damn you. But it will bother those interested in truth.